Shropshire blue – Colour me simple

I would like to nominate Shropshire Blue as a colour in a Crayola Box. I’ve just discovered it’s through a swift search on Google that it’s a cheese originally made in Scotland and only recently made in the region of its name. Anyway, I was out on my walk in the hills around Ludlow yesterday and it was a stunning sky not pale blue; it was a deeper hue and in my mind it’s become associated with the blue skies I see from the hill-top view where I live on the edge of Ludlow – now dubbed Shropshire Blue.

Since I’ve moved to Ludlow from London I’ve taken a chill-pill approach to life. Your surroundings demand it. The hush in the forests, the stillness that is only broken by the rustle of a furry creature in the underbrush or the short-haired deer, you hardly encounter another human being after hours in the woods. So a screaming mind, the complications of life as a single mother, of recent separation from a loved one, financial worries all become submissive in the face of nature and stunning scenery here in Shropshire.

While I am well aware of how-do-gooderish that sounds, well, it’s true for me. I feel more alive to my environment than I have done in a long time. I won’t pretend that it’s all Mary Poppins in the country but there is a welcome simplicity to life here that even your troubles are delineated into ordered alternatives. Lonely? A) make friends or B) stay at home and feel sorry for yourself. I’ve done both and A takes a lot more energy than B but the payoff is far greater. If I were in London I would already have option A so therefore B would have been my chosen alternative to spend more time in hibernation.